Along the lines of the same universal principal that dictates no matter how nice a living room you have or how small you kitchen, all guests will congregate in the room with all the food, I find that food is often used as an indicator of quality relationships. I look forward all year to the Christmas party thrown for as long as I can remember by some of my dad's collegues-- interesting conversations always abound and you can count of interesting orzdevours and a tastey cheese ball. I fondly remember last summer's trip to Johnson City to visit Tim and Kim as correlating with a particularily fabulous sandwich at a restaurant they took us to. During the school year, the less-than-warm-and-fuzzy feelings I have for food and housing services contrast the eagerness I have to return home to the safe and snarky bosom of my family, where wine and interesting cheese (or at least the trusty standby of a basic cheddar) are always on hand. I look forward even more to the rarer, but more elaborate dinners with Dear Boyfriend's family, such as the Valentine's Day dinner they invited me and Alex's older brother's girlfriend to when they knew we were probably lonely, the menfolk being stuck out of town at school.
That theory established, it's interesting to chart how food and relatinoships change together over time. In highschool, marathon episodes of hanging out in friends' basements were ocassionally quite fun, but could also turn out to be epic exersises in boredom. There's just not that much to do as a teenager, so being bored somewhere other than home is definantly a higher quality of boredom than the dullsville of you own basement. As for the food at such events, the unfortunate host's parents almost always had to foot the bill for a hoard of hungry-but-broke youngsters, and the result were plates of Wal Mart brand chicken nuggets, or if we had the cash on hand to all chip in, a few greasy Pizza Hut pizzas. None of us ever had any money, so going out to dinner or lunch was rarely an option, however much we might have wanted to get out of the house.
College has seen a vast improvement in the quality and number of freindships, and the culinary face of that includes collaborative sphagetti dinners, bring-your-own-beer fests, girl's nights out complete with dressy outfits, and potluck suppers. I recall a number of especially nice nights, such as when another couple Alex and I are friends with invited us over for a delicious dinner of shrimp cooked in exotic fruits-- one member of this couple works at a cook downtown and just got into a fine cooking school in New York. Another was a tea party that exploaded into a fullblown dinner when every guest arrived with an offering of some sort.There have been too the meals I've cooked for Alex in attempts to continue to woo him-- Valentines Day sushi and well-meant but bizarre concoctions made out of lentils.
Food is an offering, a creative effort, an expression of the desire to nurture and please those we share it with. It is a shared experience, a memorable experience. It occured to me while looking back on yesterday's lunch at Yellow Deli , and happening to remember those begruded plates of chicken nuggests, that despite food's fleeting nature, it's a lot more important to me to share it with others than buy myself something selfish like a ring or a movie. Food might make its way out physically eventually, but the times it conjures last a long time.
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